Consumer culture

Take a joyride through comfortable suburbia—a landscape molded by seductive television and corporate America (and keep in mind: disaster is another logo for your consumption...). This is the age of the "culture jammed" consumer preened with Friends hair, Survivor courage, and CNN awareness. A generation emptying their wallets for the most important corporate product of all: lifestyle. The psychological road trip across a slightly battered America travels at One Mile per Minute.

Using a pulsing rock soundtrack and music video-style editing, Tony Cokes combines archival footage of Malcolm X, advertisements, and corporate logos in No Sell Out to provide a scathing commentary on commodity culture.

Originally presented as a live performance piece using actors, multiple monitors, and music, Modern Times is a consolidation of seven short chapters in the life of a modern woman. In the first sequence, the objects in a suburban home are inventoried: "nice couch", "nice car", and so on—ending with the titles "nice concept", "nice image"—and unmasking this materialistic world as an impossible consumer fantasy. In the next scene, an attractive man sunbathes.

Award-winning videomaker Kip Fulbeck brings his blistering pace, comedic skill, and critical eye to bear on the Hapa and Asian American male experience—parodying the relationships between sex, love, and martial arts movies.

Scenes from the Micro-War explains, "The worst of times—riots, famine, war—could be just around the next corner and, in the battle to survive, this family is going to be battle-ready from here on in." This fractured narrative follows the misadventures of a family hypnotized by Reagan’s Space Wars, state terrorism, and Rambo/commando fashions, as the family has shifts from consumerist unit to military training force.

Using footage from a trip to the Orient, images of objects, products, the city and nature, Rankin investigates society's reverance for the "exotic" and the "pure" as manifested in tourism, Communism, Coca-Cola, Las Vegas, the Civil War, Hollywood, and photography. Examining the common idealisation of things distant in time or space, The Pure didactically reflects upon our societal penchant for categorization that begins with childhood games and is reflected in the way our culture organizes itself and the world around it.

Production Notes allows us to eavesdrop on the business decisions behind the creation of our daily diet of television commercials. This excellent tape undertakes to explode the address of seven TV ads by means of repetition, slow motion, and “production notes”— memos sent from the advertising agency to the production company prior to filming the spots, to describe the intentions, desires, strategies and ideology of the commercials and their creators.